Brand Strategies in Social Media in Hospitality and Tourism

Dear Colleagues,

The world is changing, so the strategies used by hospitality and tourism enterprises that use social media as one of the platforms to promote services, collect opinions and above all to interact with their actual and potential customers.

The new Special Issue of Sustainability “Brand Strategies in Social Media in Hospitality and Tourism” pretends to collect articles that discuss some perspectives used by the hospitality and tourism enterprises in different countries helping to understand innovative and creative brand strategies.

We welcome new perspectives and ideas about this theme, including, but not limited to:

• Brand strategies in Social Media
• Co-creating value using Social Media marketing
• Customer engagement strategies using social media
• Digital Communication
• Impacts of social media on business value and performance
• Impacts of social media on customer behavior
• Information acquisition and dissemination in social media
• Innovation
• Mobile Marketing
• Mobile social media strategies
• Social Media Adoption, Use and Potentialities
• Social Media analytics
• Social media and human resources management practices
• Social Media Influencers
• Social Media Marketing
• The role of social media in sales and marketing
• The role of social media in travel planning and decision making
• Travel experience

Hospitality and Tourism enterprises look for new ways to promote their services, concepts and experiences in different platforms. The brand strategies are today more creative and innovative and in somehow more complex and digital than ever.

The emergence of the Internet caused changes in the way of communicating between individuals and between them and organizations, becoming a means par excellence to disseminate brands and products to their potential interested / consumers. In addition, combined with social media platforms, it has become a powerful tool for marketing travel brands once: (i) allows on-to-one marketing; (ii) two-way interaction between stakeholders and tourists; (iii) accessible in any place during 24 hours a day and 365 days in a year; (iv) in last minute it is possible to change tourism products or brands; (v) provides several real testimonies that help in tourist decision making; (vi) while reducing costs in marketing campaigns and in handling reservations.

Today it is frequent to find brand strategies for hospitality and tourism enterprises associated to social media platforms, allowing a more closer contact with their own clients and other potential clients. Being present in different social media platforms allow to spread the word and above all to connect more deeply with the ones that feel the need to use, reserve and experience a service of that tourism brand.

Tourists look for social media as one place more to find information about a tourism product or destination, a decision support tool to contribute to make adequate decisions in the process of planning a trip, and in somehow a new place to interact with an enterprise. These platforms are important during all phases of a trip, as well as being present in this consumers journey.

In this digital environment, tourists share their travel experiences, impressions, emotions, special moments, and opinions about the tourist services, for example hotels, restaurants, airlines, car rental services, events or auxiliary services, all of which contributes to define online reputation of a tourist destination, while contributes to add value to the destination management organization to define new strategies that meet the needs of their customers, through campaigns that will be disclosed to the right potential tourist at the right time, anywhere and anytime.

This special issue pretends to gather some new perspectives of this kind of interactions and brand strategies in hospitality and tourism in order to create a new discussion of their importance and understand the new challenges and trends, while contributing to the definition of new research paths, as well as to present new challenges for researchers who deal with these themes.

Prof. Dr. Cláudia Ribeiro De Almeida
Prof. Dr. Célia M.Q. Ramos
Guest Editors

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• Social Media
• Brand Strategies
• Hospitality
• Tourism
• Internet Marketing